Neuroscientists have discovered why ‘aha moments’ stick in your brain long after you have them

After spending forever floundering for a solution to a problem, an “aha moment” can feel like magic. But a new study by researchers from Duke University and the University of Berlin has found that the aha moment gives us more than temporary elation.

“If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,” says Roberto Cabeza, lead author of the new study, in a statement. “There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.” The research was published this month in Nature Communications.

What is an aha moment?

The study defines an “aha experience” as a moment in which “the solution comes to you in a sudden manner, with a strong sense of certainty and a strong positive emotion.”

Suddenness, certainty, and internal reward are all important parts of the process.

When we have a flash of insight, our brains go through a process called representational change, in which our internal representations of the insight undergo rapid reorganization and integration, helping encode it into our memory.

“During these moments of insight, the brain reorganizes how it sees the image,” noted first author Maxi Becker.

In particular, the researchers found that insights with high certainty and positive emotion boosted activity in the amygdala and hippocampus brain structures. The more powerful the insights, the more activity in the hippocampus, causing more memory retention.

How was the study conducted?

To test what was happening in people’s brains when they have an aha moment, the researchers used fMRI technology to scan participants’ brains while they tried to identify a series of “Mooney images”—images of common objects reduced to minimally detailed, two-tone black-and-white figures.

The high contrast of the images made them difficult to identify immediately, improving the odds of participants having aha moments.

After they identified each object, the participants were asked to rate how suddenly they found the solution, how positive they felt, and how certain they felt that their answer was correct.

Five days later, the researchers tested the group of participants again to determine how well they remembered the Mooney images that they’d previously identified.

Strikingly, they found that participants remembered solutions that came to them in a burst of insight about twice as often as solutions they worked out more methodically.

Additionally, the researchers observed that aha moments cause a chain reaction in our brains, enhancing representative change in the brain’s ventral occipitotemporal cortex (a region responsible for visual processing), as well as activity in the amygdala and hippocampus, and engaging other solution-processing brain regions.

Stronger insights cause the “different regions communicate with each other more efficiently,” Cabeza says.

The data suggests that the brain has its own neural mechanism for insight, leading to improved memory.